Gryllidae
by cognomen
Summary: The Boss and Jack play little games to keep awake at night when neither should be sleeping. Jack takes these far more seriously than the Boss.


War rattled. It purred and roared and groaned. It wailed agony, squealed protest. Sighed defeat. Artillery streaked fire across the sky, and machine guns let out staccato firefly bursts of light. It was light and noise and sound, enough to raise masses or lay them down.

It was enough to keep two soldiers awake, huddled back to back together in a cave. Above danger, but not noise or light or fear. They were exhausted, but sat up. Neither should sleep, both knew it. Sleep tugged their limbs down heavy, left them leaning hard against each other - unwilling to shift even to accommodate the hard dig of her shoulders into his back, the jab of his vertebrae into her skin.

It was Jack who broke the silence, knowing that words would keep them from sleeping. They both desperately needed it, but both knew better. Far better to face the day deprived than to never have the chance to face it at all, and this position was far from secure.

"When I was five," He admits, starting an old game of 'I have, have you...?' that's worked them through other sleepless nights. He still considered himself in training, she wanted him to learn on his own. "I ate a cricket."

"You've eaten more since." She said, her voice quiet and level. She was tired, but her voice stayed the same. The Boss was good at keeping her head, good at hiding injury and weakness, like a bird in a flock careful to tuck up it's injured wing.

"In training." Jack rumbled, feeling his voice sink into her back where they leaned together. He kept his tone low, only faintly audible over the symphony of automatic fire below. "It's more daring if there aren't twenty other guys eating them with you."

"You have a point." She agreed, shifting faintly. Jack found her elbow sticking into his side, but didn't protest. She moved it without him having to ask, acutely aware of how the body was put together and what parts of it were most irritated by what others. "I've eaten locusts and grasshoppers, but never crickets."

"What's the difference?"

"Crickets are good luck."

None chirped nearby, and both of them heard the silence. This time, she filled it.

"I decided to become a soldier because I was sick of everyone being better than me." She confided, without revealing much of her past, and staying true only to things that he had already guessed about her. She was the master of calculation, and he knew so little about her, though they played these games on so regular a basis. He had admitted his heritage, how he'd grown up, his family. 

She'd told him only that she was a soldier to the core. That he should be, too.

"You showed them." Jack just about laughed, tucking his hands together between his knees. They were both covered by blankets, the deep green wool tented over their folded forms like a bad wrapping job. "I decided to become a soldier because I wasn't really good at anything."

"That's not a real reason." Her voice turned slightly warm with amusement. The answer fit him.

Silence again. No crickets.

"I've loved somebody who I was only supposed to respect." He says, very quietly. Maybe hoping that she wouldn't hear, possibly praying that she would. It was a real admittance, the one profound moment of real truth in all the dancing war involved.

Without malice, the Boss laughed, her shoulders shaking against his. She was only scant centimeters shorter, and he knew better than to calculate her danger based on height. "So have I."

He's slightly startled, pursues the subject in a way he's never been successful with. Prying into the Boss' past has never led anywhere but round in circles to him talking more about his. She has a way of directing things away from her, attacks or queries.

"I've never seen you with anyone." He says, running over things in his mind. Superior officers and former students passed through his thoughts, old war-buddies and comrades in arms that she had mentioned only vaguely. None of them seemed fixed enough in her life to be in love.

"He's out there, somewhere." She did not gesture to indicate. He suspected that was as much as he would get from her. He could not guess that she meant beyond this scope of existence, but the Boss was often vague like that.

He couldn't keep the injury from his soft tone, keeping it low in the hopes that it would be drowned by the slowing machine gun fire. "But I'm right here."

Silence. Wings began to fiddle together, nervously raising chirps over the quiet. 


End file.
